Sierra LaMar Kidnapping Suspect Charged In 3 More Attacks

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MORGAN HILL (CBS SF) — Antolin Garcia-Torres, accused in the alleged murder-kidnapping of missing Morgan Hill teen Sierra La Mar, also will face charges Wednesday in the alleged attacks on three women in 2009, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.

The district attorney’s office today filed an amended complaint against Torres to include three separate counts of attempted kidnapping in the commission of a carjacking, Deputy District Attorney David Boyd said.

Santa Clara County Judge Jerome Nadler today said Torres will be arraigned Wednesday in Superior Court on murder and kidnapping charges in the LaMar case and the other charges related to altercations with three women in Morgan Hill in 2009.

Torres, 21, is still awaiting trial following his arrest on May 22 in connection with LaMar’s disappearance, which has attracted national attention.

The charges of attempted kidnapping came from three alleged confrontations the defendant had with women on March 19 and March 26, 2009 in the parking lots of Safeway stores in Morgan Hill, according to prosecutors.

On March 19, a 36-year-old Morgan Hill woman told Morgan Hill police a man followed her to her car in the parking lot of a Safeway at 840

E. Dunne Ave. around 11 p.m., and about a half hour later a second woman said a man attacked her in the lot of a Safeway at 235 Tennant Avenue.

The second woman, 46, from San Martin, told police her attacker used a stun gun on the back of her neck but fled after someone nearby heard her screams.

On March 26, an 18-year-old Gilroy woman told police she was sitting in her car around 8:40 p.m. at the Safeway lot on East Dunne Avenue when a man opened her car door.

When the woman tried to remove a pocketknife from the glove compartment to defend herself, the man grabbed her hand and pulled the blade to her neck and then fled after she screamed.

Each woman provided police with similar descriptions of the attacker and officers released a sketch of the suspect.

After Torres was arrested in the suspected kidnap-murder of LaMar in May, police determined that he resembled the sketch’s likeness, which led to his arrest in the alleged 2009 attacks.

Torres, 21, who used to work at the Safeway store on Tennant Avenue, was 17 at the time of three 2009 incidents, but Boyd received permission from a juvenile court judge to charge him as an adult.

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